


paths cross

by Caelum_Blue



Series: Caelum's Canonverse [7]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Cabbages, Earth Kingdom (Avatar), Gen, Kanna's life-changing field trip, Omashu (Avatar), Pre-Series, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:40:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26735245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caelum_Blue/pseuds/Caelum_Blue
Summary: Written for the #atla15 challenge. Prompt - Cabbages.45 years pre-series. While passing through the Omashu region on her way to the Southern Water Tribe, Kanna takes a minute to talk to a local.
Series: Caelum's Canonverse [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/817911
Comments: 22
Kudos: 36
Collections: #atla15 -- Avatar the Last Airbender 15th Anniversary Prompt Challenge





	paths cross

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there! I've been meaning to work on the atla15 challenge all year, but because 2020, it slipped my mind. But for some reason this decided to write itself today, possibly as a reaction to current stress, so. *shrugs* It's unbeta'd and probably rough, I really don't care. *shrugs again*
> 
> Enjoy!

“Excuse me,” Kanna said, approaching the merchant cart. The young man operating it seemed to be some sort of vegetable vendor, and half the reason Kanna was trying him first was because she was intrigued by his merchandise. Plants fascinated her - there were  _ so many _ of them in the Earth Kingdom, and they were easier food to find than meat was. Which was very much the opposite of the Water Tribe’s situation. Kanna didn’t think she’d ever get used to eating so many vegetables, and she desperately missed whale blubber, but she told herself to enjoy the interesting food while it lasted. These vegetables were unlike any she’d seen yet. From afar they’d looked like a mass of green lumps, closer up now she saw they were spherical shapes, balls of green leaves that folded smoothly over each other. Were they made of leaves all the way to the center? Or was there something hiding inside, like an oyster with a pearl?

“Hello!” the young man said, turning with a welcoming smile. “Could I interest you in some fine cabbages? We have the finest quality this side of Omashu!”

Kanna blinked. “Those are  _ cabbages?” _ She’d heard of cabbages, of course. She always asked street food vendors and restaurant servers what they put in their dumplings and potstickers and spring rolls and other strange dishes, and cabbage had come up often. As far as she’d been able to tell, it was some sort of long, thin, stringy vegetable. Now she realized it must have been chopped up.

The young man’s salesperson smile faltered, apparently unsure of what to do in the face of someone who didn’t know what a cabbage was. “Uh,” he said, looking Kanna up and down. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

There were two kinds of people who used that phrase, Kanna had found - the ones who were about to give her some friendly advice, and the ones who were about to swindle her. She’d considered swapping out her clothes for something green or brown or less obviously foreign, but she didn’t want to give up the blue sealskin. The dress was all she had left of her mother, and while she was certain her mother had disowned her by now, she couldn’t bear to part with something that’d been made for her with such love.

“I’m not,” Kanna admitted, and she pointedly lifted the map she was holding. As interesting as the cabbages were, the other reason she’d approached him was because he was clearly some kind of traveling merchant, and even if he only traveled locally, he was still more knowledgeable of the area than she was. Maybe if he was nice, she’d consider letting him swindle her into some cabbages. “I’m trying to make my way south, and I wondered if you could give me some tips? I’ve never been there before.”

He tilted his head, fingers drumming on a cabbage. “Are you headed anywhere in particular?”

“South in general,” Kanna said, and then clarified, “the South Pole, eventually.”

His eyes widened. “That’s a long journey.”

She grinned. “I started at the North Pole.” It was probably safe to say that now. She was below the equator, she doubted anyone was still following her.

The young cabbage merchant looked impressed. “I can’t imagine traveling so much,” he said. 

“It’s been interesting,” Kanna said. She thought of the spring festival she’d attended in some Earth Kingdom province she’d forgotten the name of already. “Sometimes fun.” She recalled the long day and night she’d spent crossing the Great Divide, without food for fear of predators. “Sometimes not.” But it had all been worth it. “I’m glad I did it, though.” Over the last six months she’d walked around mountains and hitched rides with kind strangers and swapped tales in taverns and danced at festivals she didn’t know the significance of and watched the constellations slowly change above her as she made her way to an entirely different hemisphere, and the whole time she had thought -  _ I could be married right now. I could be making a home with Pakku right now. I could be expecting my first child right now. _

She was so very, very glad she wasn’t.

And who would have thought the world was so  _ big, _ beyond those massive, isolating walls of ice?

“You’re braver than me,” the cabbage merchant said. “I’ll just stick to visiting all the towns and villages here in the Omashu region. The only reason I’d travel farther than that is if the Fire Army itself were on my heels!” He leaned over her map. “So what did you want to know?”

Kanna traced her finger over a main road outlined on the map. “I see this leads down towards the southern coast eventually, so I was thinking I’d follow it to a port town so I can figure out how to get over the sea. Is there anything to be worried about on the way?”

He tapped near one of the mountains. “There’s a bunch of bandits who like to hide along the ridges here and ambush travelers.” He looked aggrieved. “They’ve got Earthbenders, so you want to be careful.”

Kanna nodded and gave him a look. “Personal experience?”

He scowled. “They weren’t happy that I didn’t have much money. They smashed my cart with a  _ boulder! _ My poor cabbages…”

Kanna grimaced. “I’m sorry. That sounds…” Dangerous? Terrifying? “...awful.”

“You’re traveling alone, right?” he asked, looking her up and down again. “And you’re obviously foreign and… Well, you’ll want to be careful. See if you can join up with one of the trade caravans that goes by there. There’s safety in numbers. Find one with a good amount of guards. Sometimes,” he added, conspiratorial, “the Beifong family sends trade that way from Gaoling. If you can find one of their merchants heading home, they’ll be the best guarded.”

Kanna nodded, grateful for the information. She’d have to think of some way to convince a caravan to let her tag along. It shouldn’t be too hard, though - this entire trip had been a crash course in economics. She’d traded Water Tribe items to merchants in the northern Earth Kingdom for trinkets, traded northern Earth Kingdom trinkets in the middle Earth Kingdom for spices, and had just traded those spices in Omashu for a map and jewelry. She’d figure it out. She’d learned she could.

“I was also wondering about this,” she said, tapping the map again, right at the sudden, massive curve in the road that she couldn’t puzzle out the reason for. “What’s going on here? That’s quite a big detour. Could I just cut straight across to save time?”

The cabbage merchant took one look at the map and blanched. “Oh, no, you don’t want to go  _ there,” _ he said. “That’s the Foggy Swamp.”

Kanna had learned what a swamp was. She hadn’t been impressed. “Ah,” she said. “So mud and muck. I’ll stick to the road.”

“Good plan,” he nodded. “And the mud and muck would be the least of your worries. That place is strange.”

“I’m from the North Pole,” Kanna said. “Everything is strange to me.”

“The Foggy Swamp is  _ dangerous _ strange,” the cabbage merchant insisted. “People say it’s haunted. Spirits hide in the water and the trees. I’ve even heard the plants there  _ move on their own.” _ He shuddered.

“I guess that’s a good reason for people to avoid it,” Kanna said, perturbed.

“Oh, there’s some people that live there. But they’re strange too.”

Kanna nodded and looked back down at her map. That sounded a little too adventurous for her tastes. “I’ll stick to the road,” she said again. “Thank you for the help.”

“You’re very welcome!” he smiled. “Now,  _ would _ you be interested in a cabbage?”

He’d been kind and very helpful, and she’d taken up his time and was still intrigued by the cabbages. “I would be,” she smiled back. He told her his price, which didn’t seem extortionist, and she handed over a few of the Earth Kingdom coins she had in exchange for a cabbage. “So how do I eat this?” she asked, turning it over in her hands. It really was a ball of leaves. She poked a finger under the topmost leaf, and found another leaf beneath it. “Should I just bite into it? Is it leaves all the way down?”

He laughed. “Yes, yes, leaves all the way down! I don’t recommend biting into it.”

She peeled off the topmost leaf and stuffed it into her mouth. “...it tastes like a leaf,” she decided, after she’d managed to swallow it.

He laughed again. “Let me get you a recipe.”

“Something simple,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what I eat when I’m between towns, how’s that?”

That night, Kanna made camp on the road and fried chopped cabbage, tossing in a few of the spices she’d kept for herself. It was, as the cabbage merchant had promised, simple, but also delicious. Strange, like all of Kanna’s meals had been since leaving home, but still something she was glad to experience.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it. If you wanna leave kudos or comments that would be great. I am having what might be classifiable as a bad day, so nice words are nice. :)
> 
> The more I think about it the more I think it's kinda funny Kanna didn't know about the Foggy Swamp Tribe, because you'd think if she heard "oh yeah the Earth Kingdom has a Water Tribe too and it's literally on your way to the South Pole" she'd at least go check it out. There's a whole mountain range blocking the southern portion of the Earth continent, so it'd make sense for her to avoid it, head south from the Omashu area, and that'd take her super close to the swamp. Even if she didn't want to talk about her travels later, you'd think she'd say something after having a Waterbender granddaughter. So I can only assume she just heard creepy rumors about the swamp, decided she was gonna avoid it, and then boom, Katara and Sokka are super surprised to discover a third Water Tribe decades later.
> 
> I'm kinda sorry I didn't somehow destroy the cabbage cart and make our dear Cabbage Merchant wail his catchphrase, but I figure he's due at least one nice interaction with another character, lol.


End file.
